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I never looked up how much the reward was, for the recovery of Faith Manning and Duncan Kane. I wasn’t sure I could hold out, if I knew. The guy was nice to me one time. What’s one day, one guy, probably ninety seconds of basic cafeteria decency, compared to four fucking years of being invisible to everyone in Neptune High? That was the thing, though. It was a low bar, but it’s not like any of those other assholes cleared it. Kane was the guy who stood up, shoved another 09er out of the way, and made a space at the lunch table like he knew me. Like he saw me.
It was funny, because just a couple months later his sister died, and it was like everyone turned invisible for him. Forget skinny freshmen that nobody else bothered with either, I’m talking about his teachers, his friends - even his creepy Kane-bot parents. I’m not sure he ever looked at a person and saw them again, in high school. And you could tell it was killing his friends, at least those other two, but I would never have known the difference if it hadn’t been for that day.
Not the funny kind of funny. I guess that was rude. You know what I mean.
I hope he changed back again, for the kid. Probably everybody feels like their parents don’t see them, at some point in their lives - usually when you’re a 120-pound Clearasil ad and your parents are asking why don’t you make friends with any of the kids from those nice families, right? - but I can’t imagine starting out invisible and staying that way, never knowing any different even from the person who’s supposed to be closest to you. That would give anybody a complex. Sounds like the intro narrative in one of those documentaries - the makings of a serial killer, right?
Fuck, that was rude, too. I guess it’s hard on my filter, remembering all this. You don’t send a guy digging through the bad old days without dredging up some weird reactions. Except my bad old days don’t really compare, right? Neptune was like that. Half of us got handed your average high school bullying and neglect, and then the other half - you wouldn’t believe me. Like, here’s my worst day in high school: sophomore year, I got clipped on my bike by some rich girl in a convertible, flew off the shoulder and broke my wrist on a mailbox. Six weeks of leaning against the wall in gym and trying to write with my off hand: it sucked. That same semester? Kids in my high school got stabbed, drowned, beaten up by rival gangs, and lost their parents - plus some recent grad discovered she was the secret love child of our principal and the lunch lady. All in, like, six months. Madison Sinclair yelling her insurance provider out the window while she drove away doesn’t even really make a dent, you know? You could tell me pretty much any story, about anybody, and if they were from Neptune - I’d believe you.
I hope he didn’t kill his sister, though. They couldn’t pin it on that movie star, so I guess it could have been almost anybody.
Don't think I didn't doubt myself, letting him get away. It wasn't all out of loyalty to the guy he was (for all of ninety seconds, once, in high school. I know, okay?) There was some self-preservation in there, too. The 02-er survival guide had a full chapter on not crossing Veronica Mars, and as soon as the feds came sniffing around it was pretty clear that she’d rigged the whole thing up for him. For all the courts ever proved different, she could have killed Lilly Kane, and she had this other guy, total psycho and Duncan’s best friend, all but wrapped around her little finger. I guess he joined the military - he’s Uncle Sam’s psycho now. Funny to think that he’s got access to the armory but if I met them today - I’d still be more scared of her.
I’m not saying it was all fear, either. My family went to church with the Mannings. Watching Meg toe the line and Lizzie tear across it and the youngest girl - what was her name? - out sick all the time with something nobody talked about. You couldn’t spend ten minutes in a pew with the Manning family without feeling sick-to-your-stomach grateful that you’d be going home with your own instead. We all knew what that baby would be in for, if the Kanes handed it over. Even growing up invisible on some tax shelter island that only 09ers have ever heard of - well, it had to be better than that.
It wouldn’t have even been my call to make, except I caught him at the police station that day. Last known sighting of Duncan Kane.
You know how they show sleepwalkers in movies? How they can open doors and have conversations but everybody’s always on edge, because there’s just no there there? Duncan Kane had looked like that the whole time I knew him, from spring semester my freshman year until the day he disappeared from school. So when I got there late that night, hoping to catch my sister before our parents did, there was something almost weirder than realizing I’d just run into a fugitive. It was that I was talking to Duncan Kane, and he looked awake.
He looked - I know this is stupid, okay, he was on the run - but he looked like he could finally see everything he was looking at: me, the fleet of deputy vehicles, the scrap iron leaning against the back of the dumpster because Neptune was a pit like that, shiny signs in the front of the buildings and a mess anywhere someone thought was out of the way. He was taking in all the available information, and if you had seen him before - you had to have seen him before, I guess, to understand.
I can’t say that I’d ever even talked to his sister, but I watched the memorial video along with everyone else, and this was the first time I’d thought that they looked anything alike.
He even cracked a joke, said, “You could turn me in,” and it was funny, because we were already there, you know? I looked around and he laughed a little, so I knew it was a joke and not, like, an offer. Not all that funny, but funny wasn’t really the Kanes’ strong suit. You could tell that all the way from the bottom rung, in high school.
(The other two were funny like a reflex; you could see their own words catch up with them after everybody else started cracking up. The Kanes were the ones who laughed. They’d make or break you by whether or not they laughed.)
I laughed, too, mostly because it was so weird to see him there, in the place where I picked up my sister when she was covering the family disappointment shift with a DUI or whatever. Duncan Kane in the back lot of the Neptune’s Sheriff’s Department with his face cracked open like that.
I said, “Or I could give you a lift.” That was probably when I remembered the reward, so it was a little shaky as offers go, but I meant it. Somewhere between that day in the cafeteria (and the day watching the memorial video, and the day the bus went over the cliff’s edge but only Meg came back up, and all the days her little sister never showed up in church) and this moment, with Kane’s live-wire eyes? This had turned into a situation I’d break the law for.
It’s not like I’d ever tell her, but if she knew, my sister would be so proud.
I didn’t give him a lift, in the end, but I helped him into the trunk, closed it after him, and made sure he could breathe. Then I left. My sister had cleared out with her friends for once, so there wasn’t much else I could do.
Oh, I had plenty of questions. What his plan was, for one thing, on the broad scale. How the hell he got a key fob for the Neptune Sheriff’s cruiser, to start the list of specifics.
Or really - I know how he got it. How Veronica got it, that’s the real question - that’s the question you should be asking about the whole story. But nobody's ever telling that story, as far as I can tell. And if the US government doesn’t need to know…I guess I don’t either.